The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  They dined on canvasback duck and desultory conversation as the Delilah steamed down the Mississippi. Afterward, they went up on the top deck and gazed out at the shrouded land. Somehow the darkness accentuated America’s immensity. Caroline felt it as a gigantic embrace—the East with its crowded millions, the West with its stupendous spaces, meeting here on this surging river. The pounding engines sent vibrations of power through the huge steamboat. The smokestacks left a trail of sparks on the black, gleaming water.

  “I almost wish we had been lovers all these years,” she said.

  “No. You were right. It’s better this way. In fact, I’m beginning to think it might be a mistake for us to become lovers now.”

  Caroline felt a mixture of relief and confusion. She realized she had not been looking forward to his visit to her stateroom. She no longer wanted to simulate emotions she did not feel. But she did not like the suggestion that he felt no need to visit her. She did not want him to escape her.

  What was he trying to do? He had become far more devious than she suspected. Hardly surprising after twenty years in Washington, D.C. She reminded herself of how often the newspapers portrayed him as a past master of political corruption, the crafty emperor of Louisiana. Was he waiting for her to protest? She said nothing.

  “George can still be very useful to us,” he continued. “When the South secedes, he can step forward as the voice of moderation. He can urge the North to let us go in peace. He can speak as a man who has a son in the North and a son in the South. He can personify the nation’s anguish.”

  “Yes.”

  “He could run for president of the Northern half of the Union on a peace ticket. I could do the same thing on a Southern ticket. You’d be the invisible arbiter, the voice of reason and negotiation, between us. You’d control the fate, the destiny, of the continent. Perhaps two continents.”

  “Yes!”

  She pressed her lips against his mocking mouth. There was only one way to guarantee her devotion, and he knew it. He knew the way to her inner heart, to that lonely cave of ice, better than anyone else in this bedeviled world. She was willing to let his pride, his long cruel years of waiting, make her the supplicant. It was a kind of proof of their equality.

  Prudence required them to descend from the upper deck separately. A half hour later, Caroline was in her nightgown when he knocked on the stateroom door. She kissed him again, passionately, angrily, the moment the door closed. She was telling him that she understood, she was ready to be the suppliant. With a heart full of vengeance, she would love her vindicator.

  He turned down the oil lamp and undressed. Almost rudely, he pulled off her nightgown and flung it on the floor. “Still as beautiful as ever.”

  He was lying of course. She no longer studied her body in the mirror. But she knew her flesh had grown soft and flaccid. Her breasts sagged. There was a deep line of worry or woe just above her nose. He was no longer a thing of male beauty. His lean face surmounted an almost gaunt body. The withering process she had noticed years ago continued to shrink his flesh, while George grew more comfortably padded. What was the source of his avoirdupois? A clear conscience?

  Or was the body ultimately meaningless, something to lacerate, to torment, for the sake of the soul? Maybe that was the best answer, Caroline thought as he inserted his finger in her vagina and began moving it in and out, in and out, not touching her in any other way. He was telling her that in all their future transactions, he wanted to be the master of their furtive revels—if there were any more.

  Eventually he took her with swift savage thrusts. It lasted less than a minute. When it was over, he did not lie beside her as George used to do, fondling her, whispering how much he loved her. He went over to the sink and washed himself, put on his clothes, and sat down at the end of the bed. She put on her nightgown—a defensive gesture. She did not want to lie there naked while he talked to her.

  “George should by no means be our only resource when the crisis comes,” he said in a crisp dry voice that crackled like pinewood in a fireplace.

  “Oh?”

  “Julia Tyler is another card you must be ready to play.”

  “How?”

  She hated his voice of authority. It was as flat, as matter-of-fact , as if he were reading stock market quotations.

  “I think her husband is already halfway to secession. You and Julia should bring him the rest of the way. So he can make a resounding statement at the right moment. Ex-presidents can always get attention in the newspapers.”

  “I see.”

  “Write to Julia. Invite her to Washington. I gather she’s desperate to get off the plantation.”

  “Yes, massa.”

  “This is serious business.”

  “You killed Old Zach, didn’t you.”

  “It was necessary.”

  Oh, my dear girl, I fear for thy salvation.

  For the first time Caroline truly heard those words. Hannah Cosway Stapleton was talking about evil. Hitherto, evil had not worn a face. There had not been a single specific act that reeked of it—except, perhaps, Tabitha’s kidnapping and death. But that was just the blind brutality of a system, not much worse than the Stapleton’s Northern factories where women and children worked twelve hours a day and often lost fingers, hands, arms, in the whirring machines. That kind of evil was mundane, part of the world’s everyday furniture. The evil they confronted now wore a specific human face. It was personal. They were accepting it, perpetuating it in this scented stateroom, with the SS Delilah’s engines throbbing power power power beneath them. Aaron Burr had told them Americans could not be powerful and good. He had not bothered to take the next step and tell them that power required acts of evil such as the one he had committed the day he killed Alexander Hamilton.

  Evil. John Sladen had just loved her the way men loved women in brothels. Caroline knew that with harsh instinctive certainty. He had been having sex in Washington, D.C., brothels for two decades. All those years of loveless love, of the mere conjunction of bodies, had been her fault, Caroline thought. So it was fitting that she should have this loveless fucking, as the Africans called it, for her reward.

  Evil. Caroline sensed it flowing through her icy cave, a dark snaking stream. It would be interesting to see where this new reality took her. It was a journey she could only share with this man. That too was more than fitting. It was written in the book of fate since they had embarked on that underground river of desire in New York twenty-five years ago.

  “How did you do it?” she asked.

  “There are poisons that leave no trace. The voodoo doctors in New Orleans know them all. They brought them from Africa two hundred years ago.”

  Evil. How fascinating, the way it was woven into America’s struggle with the black anaconda of slavery. From the start this thing was coiled around liberty’s feet, ready to slowly, inexorably rise higher and higher. Had they found the answer to it in doing evil to fight evil, like fighting fire with fire? Perhaps. Caroline only knew she was ready to defy goodness in the name of vindication—and fame.

  FOUR

  CAROLINE SPENT THE NIGHT WRITING it all down in her journal. Sleepless, dazed, she met John Sladen for breakfast. “You’ve become evil,” she said.

  “I don’t believe the moral law extends south of New England.”

  “I like it. It adds breadth to your character. Did you act alone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I wish I could tell Sarah. Zachary Taylor deserved to die. That vicious old man wasted ten thousand lives in Mexico. He destroyed Polk’s presidency. He killed Polk as surely as you’ve killed him.”

  “I didn’t do it to punish him. I did it to save the South and the North from a bloodbath. I did it, ultimately, to rid the South of slavery. Once we have Mexico, Central America, Cuba, we’ll be able to begin a process of gradual manumission. It will be carefully administered peonage, at first, slowly graduating over a century to complete freedom in a racially balanced empire.” />
  Caroline almost laughed. He wanted to be good! He wanted to slay the black anaconda. Oh, my dear boy, I fear for thy salvation. She almost said it to him. She almost told him about Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s voice. But he would think she was mad. Besides, she shared this ultimate noble wish. But she wondered why he did not sense how violently it clashed with their embrace of evil.

  “Last night you treated me like a whore. I liked it. Do it again tonight. Do it every night. I want to become as evil as you are.”

  His eyes glittered with barely suppressed rage. “You want to know everything, don’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  For the next five nights, he came to the stateroom and fucked her. She made him say the word. She made him tell her the whorehouse names of the positions he ordered her to assume. She obeyed all his commands, however loathsome. Never once did he use the word love. Afterward, each night, he sat at the foot of the bed and she lounged, naked, against the headboard while he elaborated his vision of a Southern empire.

  The poverty that had enraged the South in the days of the tempests over the tariff was history. In the bottomlands of Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and the immensity of Texas, the South had discovered riches beyond the wildest dreams of the California gold rushers. The world’s appetite for cotton was apparently insatiable. In 1850, the South produced 100 million pounds. By 1860, it would produce 200 million pounds. All they had to do was put a 5 percent tax on that immense avalanche of fiber and they would have $100 million a year to spend—twice the size of the federal budget for the entire United States. With that money, they would create a navy and an army with the latest weaponry and become one of the great powers of the world.

  The empire would be utterly different from the puritanized nation of the North. Its opulent liberties would be based on power and privilege. Its rulers would preside over the lesser races who fought in their armies and toiled on their plantations and in their factories. It would be a new Rome that would eventually destroy the effete rationalizing Yankees of the North and in fifty years rule both Americas. It would give the law to Europe and Asia and India. Allied with England’s aristocracy, it would institute a reign of the elect around the globe.

  As he spoke, his voice became as shrouded as the room. The Delilah’s engines throbbed. Once, her smokestack roared defiance into the night. The river hissed beneath the portholes. Caroline saw the Mississippi on the map, winding through the continent—an image of the black anaconda in America’s heart.

  “I want to be part of it,” Caroline said. “Will you build a statue to me in some secret shrine? Let that be my reward.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There’ll be two capitals. One, where the people meet in Congress; the second, where the secret rulers meet, the unelected elect. We’ll have statues of our heroes there.”

  “Heroes—and heroines.”

  “Yes.”

  By day they gazed out at proofs of the South’s opulence and strength. Mile after mile, the great cotton plantations stretched over the horizon on both sides of the river. White-pillared mansions glistened down avenues of cypress and swamp oak trees. At Memphis and Natchez, where Delilah paused to take on more cargo, they hired carriages and rode through the crowded downtown business streets to the splendid houses of the brokers and lawyers and doctors King Cotton enriched. Finally, at noon on the fifth day, John took her up to the top deck and waited while the Delilah rounded a huge bend and New Orleans appeared in the distance. He ticked off the principal buildings as they drew closer: the soaring towers of St. Louis Cathedral, the bulky block-long Customs House, and the domed grandeur of the St. Charles Hotel.

  On the levee, waving cheerfully, stood Charlie in a cream-colored suit, carrying a huge bouquet of red roses. He looked impossibly handsome in the dense sunshine; his black hair gleamed; the rakish set of his jaw, his reckless smile, were an exact copy of the portrait of her father in his uniform on the wall at Bowood. Caroline felt a leap of saturnine joy, dark faith. This son would help her realize her father’s dream of fame.

  Charlie gave Caroline a resounding kiss and pumped John Sladen’s hand. “Isn’t this the nicest coincidence?” Caroline said. “I walked aboard at St. Louis and there stood the senator from Louisiana.”

  “Wonderful,” Charlie agreed. He waved to a waiting hackman and they rumbled past the cotton wagons and oyster ped- dlers that crowded the huge riverside square named after Andrew Jackson. “I reserved a suite for you at the St. Charles, Mother. You don’t want to live with a bachelor. It would start a war that only a Thucydides could adequately describe. Wouldn’t you agree, Senator?”

  “Emphatically,” John Sladen said.

  The senator went off to his town house and Charlie escorted her around New Orleans and its environs in a hired gig. Caroline was entranced by the houses of the Vieux Carré, with their long balconies covered with filigreed iron. They drove out to the site of Andrew Jackson’s triumph in 1815, and Charlie virtually refought the battle for her. They visited the immense Cotton Exchange, with its tiers of balconies around a central court where brokers and factors shouted bids and made and lost fortunes weekly.

  At the end of the day they dined on foie gras and bouillabaisse at a French restaurant whose chef had recently arrived from Paris. Charlie entertained her with tales of John Sladen’s political power in Louisiana. Charlie was unbothered by the corruption. Unlike his brother Jonathan, he did not have a reformer’s bone in his body. He accepted human nature as it always had been and always would be.

  “You’re looking contented, Mother,” Charlie said. “You don’t strike me as the termagant that Brother Jonathan describes, abusing father and him and Paul every time they open their mouths.”

  “Your father and I have settled our quarrel. It was about Mexico. I thought we should have kept it all. But he prevailed.”

  “Senator Sladen says if he’d taken the other side—and stayed out of the Tabitha mess—he’d be on his way to the presidency.”

  “Don’t judge your father too harshly at a distance.” Defending George as a man with a sensitive conscience, she managed to simultaneously please his son and portray herself as a woman of compassion and understanding. It was remarkable, having embraced evil, how easy it was to impersonate goodness. It was the struggle to remain good that caused so much spiritual anguish—and muddled so many bold enterprises. Sarah Polk was a living example of this melancholy revelatory truth.

  The next night there was a dinner in Caroline’s honor at the town house of Victor Conte Legrand, son of the senator who had been John Sladen’s mentor when he came to New Orleans. Victor was a pompous, oily little man, swollen with self-importance. But he had two attractive daughters and immense political influence inside Louisiana, thanks to his wealth and family connections. The younger of the two daughters, Cynthia, was a beauty, with thick, lustrous, dark hair and green eyes beneath long, seductive lashes, and with an alluring figure. During dinner, Legrand talked jovially of Cynthia marrying Charlie and forming a family alliance that would guarantee peace and prosperity between North and South.

  Caroline said she thought that was a wonderful idea. “How old is Cynthia?” she asked.

  “She’ll be thirteen in January,” Legrand said.

  “I trust you’re not thinking of a June wedding.”

  Legrand found that amusing. “I think we should wait for a number of things to mature. Senator Sladen tells me you’re with us, heart and soul.”

  “I believe in the South’s rights—and her wrongs.”

  “We need more of the latter to convince the trimmers. There are amazing numbers of people who still believe in the Union.”

  “You’ll get wrongs,” she said. “The abolitionists are perfect foils. They’ll supply you with plenty of ammunition.”

  “Perfect foils—I like that,” Legrand said. “We’ll make them perfect fools before we’re through.”

  He had fought in Mexico at the head of a regiment. His voice became choked with rage as he d
escribed the feelings of his men when they were told they were going home—abandoning the conquest for which so many of their friends had died. “How I wished Andrew Jackson were still alive. He would never have permitted such a disgrace. As we marched out of Mexico City, women jeered, urchins threw stones …”

  He gulped champagne. “I told the men, when we discharged them here in New Orleans, that someday I’d lead them back to Mexico. What a cheer they gave me! It shook every window in Jackson Square.”

  John Sladen was sitting on Caroline’s left. He leaned toward Victor Conte Legrand and said, “Before we march on Mexico, we have another matter to settle. If we do it well, we’ll rally every adventurous son of the South to our side.”

  “He’s talking about Cuba,” Legrand said, gulping more champagne. “It’s our answer to California as a free state.”

  “This devious man hasn’t said a word to me about it,” Caroline said.

  “The Cubans are begging us to ship an army over there and kick the Spaniards into the sea,” Legrand said. “We’ll introduce you to some of them. They’re afraid the Spanish government is going to succumb to English pressure and abolish slavery. Abolition would make them beggars overnight—or corpses. No one has forgotten Haiti.”

  He was talking about the black revolution that led to a massacre of the whites on the island of Haiti fifty years ago.

  “Old Zach—our late lamented president—opposed the idea. Another reason why his departure was welcomed by every thinking Southerner,” Sladen said.

  Caroline saw the evil in his mocking eyes. He had done it. He had murdered the president of the United States. A glance at Legrand convinced her that he knew nothing. The Creole aristocrat drank more champagne and said he agreed with Senator Sladen. Old Zach had been a good general but a terrible president.

  “What we need for our Cuban adventure is Northern support,” John Sladen said. “Someone like Senator Stapleton to sponsor a bill, making Cuba a state, Texas style—as soon as the Cuban provisional government applies for admission to the Union.”